1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computers and, more particularly, to methods and systems for using computers to display and control an entity's presence information that is published over a computer network.
2. Background and Relevant Art
The computer industry continues to develop new and efficient means for communicating through computing devices. It is now commonplace, for example, to use a personal computing device to communicate over a network via e-mail, facsimile, instant message (IM), telephony, video teleconference (VTC), gaming application and so forth. The network service providers have also become more sophisticated, in enabling greater numbers and types of computing devices to be networked together to communicate in any of the above-identified ways.
One particular advance in the computing industry includes the developed ability of service providers to identify the computing devices that connect to their networks. In addition to identifying a computing device, many service providers have also developed the ability to obtain presence information about a user that is stored on a user's computing device and that that can be published or shared over the network with other computing devices.
The term “presence information,” as defined herein, generally includes any information that describes an entity (individual, group, organization, etc.) as well as any information that that describes the one or more computing devices that are associated with the entity by a service provider. Non-limiting examples of presence information include the name, alias, image, and location of an entity. Other types of presence information include the network connection of an entity's computing device with a network (e.g., Online/Offline), as well as the entity's status on the network (e.g., signed in/signed out).
Presence information is often used by a service provider to identify an entity accessing a network, as well as to determine the presence and status of the entity on the network. Some service providers also publish presence information to other parties, with or without the express consent of the entity. This can be useful to enhance the capabilities provided by a service provider, such as, for example the instant messaging capabilities provided by a service provider.
In some circumstances, however, a service provider will publish presence information that an entity does not wish to be published. For example, a user may not want their location, name, or network status to be published. In yet other circumstances a user may wish for their presence information to be published, but in a different manner than it is currently being published by the service provider.
The ability to control what presence information is published can sometimes be controlled by very sophisticated users who know how to access the cookies and file caches that are queried by a service provider to obtain the presence information. However, even for sophisticated computer users, controlling the presence information that is obtained and published by a service provider can represent an arduous task.
The desire to control publication of presence information also extends beyond service providers, to presence aware applications. In particular, there are many applications that are configured to gather and publish presence information about a user. Many of these presence aware applications provide presence information to a service provider for publication.
Accordingly, there is currently a need in the art for a simplified and user friendly method for enabling a user to view what presence information is gathered by service providers and presence aware applications and to control what, if any, presence information is published.